July 2007
Checked Your Blog's Accessibility Lately?
There is a story on
Techcrunch about a website called White Cane Label which is an online
apparel shop designed for blind users. OK, where am I headed with this post? It’s accessibility of online
resources. Two students from RIT started this new site
as a project for their studies, but now plan to launch this fall “a non-profit effort to help blind people shop
online and easily keep...
SOS: Social Operating Systems
If you read Wired magazine, you probably have
come across their section called “Jargon Watch.” The issue I’m reading now (you can
check it out
online too) includes the term Social Operating System which they define as “a social network site like
Facebook or MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities, including entertainment and shopping, to become a...
Et tu, Moodle?
I’m not the greatest proponent of Distance Learning coures as they have
been developed and implented at many colleges and universities (including NJIT). The idea of expanding a student population without having to
budget the expense of building additional classroom space drove administrators and academic departments to shoehorn
existing course offerings into a web browser accessible...
Summer Camp for Geeks
That’s what the flyer (and webpage) called the KansasFest computer
conference of July, 2007, a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original Apple ][ computer.The Personal Personal Computer It takes an extraordinary
group of people to convene (for the 19th consecutive time) to celebrate a computer platform and philosophy that the
manufacturer abandoned in 1992, but the original...
Blogs Have Legs
When I first started this blog in February 2006, I was excited that a few dozen people were reading a post after
just 48 hours. As the weeks went on and I really decided what the foci was to be, I was a bit disappointed that the
numbers didn’t suddenly surge, though I had no reason to believe they should surge. It took a month or more
before I began looking at the stats and
noticed...
Reading Through the Summer of Love 40 Years On
It has been 40 years since the “Summer of Love” in 1967 when a cultural focus turned to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and words like hippies and tie-dye entered the vocabulary. The music of the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin and others became associated with that place too. Scott McKenzie sang that,...
The Horizon of This Flat World
Even this flat world has a horizon, and it’s
a good idea to look that way occassionally. Lots of talk about YouTube lately, especially since the over-hyped YouTube Debates, but are there comparable
sites in other countries? Someone sent me the link to iShare which is a video sharing site in India. The first thing that struck me when
I looked at the site was that the majority of videos...
Too Much Blogging Going On
I’m just back from EduWeb in Baltimore and folks were blogging away about the conference. I did no blogging at all. I did read a novel.
Remember reading books? It felt good. Technorati is currently tracking 74.8 million blogs and the growth is not slowing
down. Obviously, I like blogging and I enjoy reading blogs, but it’s getting overwhelming. When I go into my Bloglines...
First Life Version of Second Life
TGIF WebCetera
I’ve seen a few parodies like this one of what this first life we dwell in would be like if it operated as the
avatars and world of Second Life. This one is better than most. If you haven’t entered Second Life, you may not
get the all the jokes - like people typing in the air when they are chatting with you (mouths don’t move; it’s just
IM). There are...
World Still Flat; Classrooms Flattening
It has been two years since Thomas
Friedman published The World is Flat and people are still reading it and making connections to
education. Friedman is not looking at what will happen, but at what has happened. As trade and political
barriers drop & technology advances, the world gets flatter. Sounds very business-oriented and I’m not a fan
of business creeping into education....
What tech type are you?
The CollegeWebEditor blog had a post back a ways about the Pew Internet Life
& Project report, “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology
Users”. I had to track down the actual report again to figure out what my hastily scribbled notes meant
-“elite omnivore lackluster cell phone converegence” is what I wrote. (Wasn’t this in a Seinfeld episode with a joke...
Dr. Livingstone is in... and listening →
An old program script I had done with some middle school students. You are “talking” to a self-help doctor online. Writing and editing the code got the kids into the programming, but also into thinking about how to respond, branching etc. Buggy, but give a try.
Threadless Graphics
WEEKEND I came across this web site threadless.com this weekend and really like the graphics that
they offer. Plus, it’s a web 2.0 site for t-shirts. You can buy shirts, of course, but also submit your own
designs for possible use, rate those submitted, and submit photos of you in their t-shirts. They choose 4-6 each
week and pay $2000 for designs they use. What a great place for a...
Listen to the novel: Special Topics in Calamity... →
don’t fear - it’s not about physics From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com A self-absorbed scholar and a young girl crisscross America by car, flitting through college towns where they endure ill-advised sexual encounters, heartache and a potent dose of popular culture. Studded with ingenious wordplay and recondite allusions, their story veers between highbrow...
photo.net Photography →
from camera info to samples of photography as art
Went to see Mr. Potter today... →
It is on the dark side, but well done. It’s amazing that I can really enjoy the book, they can cut a lot of it out, and I still enjoy the film versions. Usually, it doesn’t work that way.
“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished...”
– Thomas Carlyle
Tumblet
This short item was posted using Tumblet - a widget for Mac users that allows a fast way to post text to your Tumblr space.
Tumblr and Tumblelogs
Tumblr (with no final vowel in the Flickr 2.0 way) is a tumblelog. A
tumblelog is a variation of a blog. It’s for short-form, mixed-media posts rather than longer editorial-style posts
that you might generally associate with blogging. So is this blogging for short attention span readers and
writers? There’s some of that, and I’m unsure about my feelings towards the...
ThinkQuest →
“ThinkQuest inspires students to think, connect, create, and share. Students work in teams to build innovative and educational websites to share with the world. Along the way, they learn research, writing, teamwork, and technology skills and compete for exciting prizes.”
Endangered New Jersey →
A web site on Endangered and Threatened Wildlife of the United States but with a special focus on New Jersey. I did this site with my son and some of his classmates in 1998 when they were sixth graders for the ThinkQuest Junior web design competition. The site was selected as a Gold Award Winner (that’s second place) in the Science and Math category.
My Bookmarks on del.icio.us →
Produce Knowledge Rather Than Reproduce Knowledge
I might have titled this post simply “Annenberg Media” which is something that I’m recommending here to
you, but if you read through this post, you’ll see what I’m really interested in about this resource. I had never
checked out the Annenberg Media offerings online. It is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation which works to advance teaching in all disciplines in K-12...
Dodge Poetry Festival 2008 →
updated information and links on this great biannual poetry festival (the biggest in the Americas) from the Poets Online blog
Special Topics In Calamity Physics - A Novel By... →
the official site for the novel
Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics... →
an audio interview from KCRW’s BOOKWORM with Pessl about her first novel
Dodge Poetry Festival 2008
I received a survey about a month ago about the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and program. It seems that the funding for it was in doubt, and I had heard rumors that the usual location (Waterloo Village in Stanhope, NJ, USA) was not going to be available any more. The survey was asking about how important I felt things like the teacher day, the student day, musical performers, ticket prices,...
The CommonCraft Show →
simple, under 5 minute, videos on social networking, RSS, wikis… using papercraft - very simple videos thyat are very effective
Bound By Law Comic Book on Fair Use and Copyright →
Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The CSPD produced a comic book called Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW? that makes a great introduction to the fair use doctrine.
Poets Online: Current Writing Prompt →
finally added a new prompt for July - after some down time - Peter Murphy’s poem “Stubborn Children” is the model for your take on a Grimm fairy tale.
Serendipity35 →
end of June - posted my 300th entry on my EdTech blog
Netflix →
I’ve reviewed over 1800 movies and it can’t make any “recommendations” to me. Something wrong with that algorithm.
